This is a thoroughly researched and readable book that provides a glimpse of life in western New South Wales during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the eyes of a woman, Rachel Kennedy (1845-1930). The book is a wonderful contribution to female biography and regional community history, and illustrates the precarity of life for women…[Read more]

Any memorials, monuments, historic sites, and other public facilities commemorate, celebrate and generally remind us about the landscape of the Cowpastures. In recent decades there has been a nostalgia turn in recovering the memory of the Cowpastures landscape. This is cast in terms of the pioneers and the legacy of the European settlement.
Some…[Read more]

The establishment of Camden in 1840 was a private venture of James and William Macarthur, sons of colonial patriarch John Macarthur, at the Nepean River crossing on the northern edge of the family’s pastoral property of Camden Park. The town’s site was enclosed on three sides by a sweeping bend in the Nepean River and has regularly flooded the…[Read more]

The Cowpastures was a vague area south of the Nepean River floodplain on the southern edge of Sydney’s Cumberland Plain. The Dharawal Indigenous people who managed the area were sidelined in 1796 by Europeans when Governor Hunter named the ‘Cow Pasture Plains’ in his sketch map. He had visited the area the previous year to witness the escaped…[Read more]

The Cowpastures emerged as a regional concept in the late 18th century, starting with the story of the cattle of the First Fleet that escaped their captivity at the Sydney settlement. The region was a culturally constructed landscape that ebbed and flowed with European activity. It grew around the government reserve established by Governors…[Read more]

This presentation was an overview of an ongoing project on how material culture across the Macarthur region of NSW is a store of collective memories of early colonial New South Wales and the Cowpastures region from 1795 to 1840. There are monuments, memorials, murals, and other items of material culture that prompt collective memories and tell…[Read more]

Early European settlers were the key actors in a place-making exercise that constructed an English-style landscape aesthetic on the colonial stage in the Cowpastures district of New South Wales. The aesthetic became part of the settler colonial project and the settlers’ aim of taking possession of territory involved the construction of a c…[Read more]

Urdu literature saw a “Reform boom” in the second half of nineteenth century. Most of the literati were engaged in understanding, and presenting their views on, the rapidly changing world around them. This article analyses a text produced in 1893 by Shad Azeemabadi, enhancing the need for reform in the Zenana. By underscoring the relationship of…[Read more]

Nazir Ahmad, often considered to be the first Urdu novelist, used narratives for understanding the quickly changing world around him, and in his work, shaped expanding possibilities and new roles for Muslim ashrāf women. Although he is usually thought of as a cleric who had a traditional approach towards society and new forms of knowledge, in…[Read more]

This article explores the normalization of Ashraf Culture and Colonizers in Majalis un-Nisa. It is argued that the colonial authorities tried at their capacity to keep themselves at length from the colonized physically and disseminated the discourse of colonial difference to present themselves as role models symbolically. While preparing the…[Read more]

Identity is the construction of the cultural process of a people, i.e. the social milieu in turn defines and shapes humans into the kinds of individuals they are. This shaping of identity is carried further and represented through the literature of a culture as well. It is the characters which come to stand for certain traits and the kinds of…[Read more]

To determine the social status of a person, Sorokin coined the idea of social space. This theme is useful in analyzing the relative position of a person in her/his group and her/his horizontal or vertical movement within and to other groups. Novel is a symbolic space, which makes possible for writers to construct the relative social status of…[Read more]

Russian military aggression and diplomatic pressure against Ukraine stems from the neo-imperial thinking of Russian elites and ordinary citizens. This thinking requires reproduction of expansionist patterns that once led Russia to its “historical greatness”: construction of a territorially large state, rich in resources and demographically div…[Read more]

This autobiographical co-authored essay explores how hate speech wounds within the logic of the Palestine exception, whereby Israel-critical speech is subjected to censorship and silencing that does not affect other controversial speech. Three months after the UK government’s “adoption” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA)…[Read more]

Ukraine’s current fight against Russian aggression carries deep historic resonances which we ignore at our peril.

Post-communist Ukraine is in the midst of implementing reforms which it missed for centuries. It gradually evolves into a unique geopolitical entity which, finally, acquires a fair chance to be consistent and self-sufficient. However, if the West takes a neutral stance today – as it frequently happened in history – a “decentralized” Ukraine…[Read more]

The article outlines the geopolitical rationale behind contemporary Russian expansionism, as well as presents the asymmetric and “hybrid” mechanisms utilized by the Kremlin to solidify its authority in the post-communist space. To do this, the article refers to the findings of American, British, Polish and Ukrainian intellectuals on the nature of…[Read more]

While Anton Chekhov’s influence on Katherine Mansfield is widely acknowledged, the two writers’ settler colonial aesthetics have not been brought into systematic comparison. Yet Chekhov’s chronicle of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East parallels in important ways Mansfield’s near-contemporaneous account of colonial life in New Zealand…[Read more]

While ecocritical poetics have effectively challenged epistemologies of nature and culture, scholars such as Heise, Huggen, Nixon, and Garrard have critiqued this emergent field’s geographic and cultural provincialism. Seeking a rapprochement between Caucasus vernacular literatures and a literary-theoretical movement (ecocriticism) still dominated…[Read more]